KURDISTAN
TURKEY : Mehdi Zana, a Voice from behind the Bars

“I
had been in jail for 18 months before I was taken
to court. While I was waiting to be called into the
courtroom I asked to go to the lavatory because I
wanted to see my face in the mirror. I stood staring
into the glass, amazed by the change. It is me, yet
it is not me. My face is emaciated and four teeth
have been broken by my guards. My skin is pockmarked
by the vermin. I look like a wild man. And then, there
are all the changes I don’t see but which I
feel,a tightness in my lungs, pain in my spine, and
worse than everything else, the absences of memory.”

Born in 1940, in Silvan, a small town near Diyarbakir,
the “capital” of Turkish Kurdistan, Mehdi
Zana has spent more than 15 years of his life in prison:
one year in 1967, three from 1971-1974, eleven from
1980-1991, and again almost a year and a half in 1994-1995.
Quite enough time beyond bars to change any man. Mehdi
Zana has been a man of action for most of his life.
Despite having almost no formal education, Mehdi Zana
became a member of the leadership of the Turkish Workers
Party (T.I.P), then of Ozgurluk Yolu (Kurdistan Socialist
Party). He was elected mayor of Diyarbekir in 1977.

Like many victims of political repression,
Mehdi Zana can say that Turkish prisons were where
the greatest part of his education was conducted.
Indeed, by his own account, his experiences behind
bars made him a writer. Since being freed from his
third sentence in 1991, he has published five books.
“Bekle Diyarbekir” (Wait for me, Diyarbekir);
“Vahsetin Gurlugu” (The day of barbary);
“Evina Dile min” (My heart’s beloved)
“Sevgili Leyla” (To dear Leyla) “
Zelal, Yeniden dogus” (Clarity).

Journey through an extraordinary hell

From 24 september 1980, the day when he was jailed
for the longest period of time, Mehdi Zana went through
hell along with thousands of other imprisoned Turks
and Kurds. It is this “Journey through an extraordinary
hell” that Mehdi Zana recounts al length. Although
some of the more shocking details have been censored
by the French translator, Mehdi Zana’s account
of his periods of imprisonment make harrowing reading.
“Even God cannot save you now”, the sadistic
soldiers who were his torturers told him as they hung
him by his arms before administering electric shocks
to his genitals and anus: “They were not trying
to kill us, they were trying to take us to the absolute
extremes of torture to break us. They wanted to
destablise us until we are ready to accept anything,
to sign anything. As they tortured us they played
music to drown out the noise -- unless they were torturing
one of their victims with special care in which case
they would stop the music -- so that all of us we
could hear him screaming”.

Mehdi Zana tells how as many as 40 detainees were
sometimes packed in one cell measuring less than two
metres by two metres, where they would be forced to
spend the entire night squeezed up against each
other like living sardines. At around 2am the guards
would open the door, pull a few prisoners out and
ask them: “Are you Turk or Kurd?”. Those
who failed to describe themselves as Turks were beaten
until they fainted. There are other accounts of prisoners
forced to drink water mixed with detergent, scaldings
with hot tea poured over sensitive parts of the body,
savagings by specially trained dogs and even immersion
in tubs full of excrement. It is not difficult to
understand why some prisoners went on hunger strike,
while others went crazy. Sometimes their feelings
of despair drove them to kill themselves.

Mehdi Zana’s books are essential reading
for anyone trying to understand the present escalation
of violence in Turkey.

However, unless some enterprising Western publisher
is prepared to publish a true translation of his works,
taken from the Turkish original, much may be lost.
At present none of Mehdi Zana’s five books is
available in English, while in French only a resume
of the author’s first two books is available,
published by Kendal Nezan of the Kurdish Institute
in Paris under the title “La Prison N°5”.

“It is time to write for history, to
tell the truth”, says Mehdi Zana; “I will
write about the Kurdish political parties, about my
party”. However Mehdi Zana is not only interested
in writing his “Diary from Hell”. He also
plans to write several novels and he has already started
work on the first one, “Silvan’s Bazar”.
Through personal accounts of some of the merchants
of the bazar of Silvan, their clients, and villagers
of the neighbourhood, Mehdi Zana will aim to present
a 30-year story of Kurdistan from 1940, when he was
born, through to 1970, the period which shaped his
own political ideas ans beliefs. He will incorporate
memories of his formative years with recollections
of Sheikh Said’s revolt (1925) and of stories
passed down to him by his father. Writing a novel
is not like writing memories, observes the author,
although he has plenty of material and memories to
work with. It is a difficult challenge but one which
is being undertaken with enthusiasm by Mehdi Zana,
a man born to political life but deprived of the opportunity
to play his part.

While Mehdi Zana sits at his desk fighting with the
problems of litterary composition, his wife, Leyla,
is also struggling to get the first major litterary
work of her life onto paper. She is working on her
autobiography which will include details of the 11
years she spent raising her children alone, while
Mehdi was in prison. In 1980 Mehdi Zana was sentenced
to 35 years in prison, where he eventually spent the
next 10 years. “I was just 20 years old. I had
a small son and I was tregnant. For the first year
after his arrest, I did not stop crying” (see
leyla Zana’s interview...)

But this time it is Leyla, rather than Mehdi, who
is composing her thought from a prison cell.
While Mehdi was a prisoner, his wife was discovering
the world of politics. She became the first Kurdish
woman ever to be elected to the Turkish parliament,
but she became disillusioned with the role and was
later sentenced to 14 years for her pains. Mehdi
is at least free but Leyla is behind bars. However
a short selection of letters published in French under
the title “Letters from jail” clearly
reveal that Leyla Zana has lost none of her sense
of moral outrage during her time behind bars. “Shimon
Peres”, says Leyla, said it was not possible
to live with the hate of 2 million Palestinian people.
How then has Turkey coped for so long with the hatred
of 15 million Kurds”?